soldiers in these distant lands. Their endowments have been liberal; they have been careful of the comforts and respectability of their clergy, and, in the general exercise of their patronage, they have exhibited a disinterestedness and an anxiety for the cause of God and goodness, which few bodies of men have exhibited under similar circumstances. The inadequacy, the delay, the frustration of their measures for the spiritual good of India, may be ascribed, with more justice, to the general ignorance which prevails in England on most points connected with these important but distant territories; to an apprehension, (certainly not an unnatural one,) on the part of the younger clergy, of an unhealthy climate, and almost a life-long banishment, and to their consequent backwardness in soliciting or accepting appointments, the duties of which are little understood, but the sacrifices incident to which are easily and generally appreciated.

And I have, therefore, thus strongly, but truly, depicted the condition of our Indian Church, both as it accounts, in no small degree, for that tardy progress of Christ's kingdom in the east with which our adversaries are not slow to taunt us; and as it affords me an opportunity of bearing testimony to the diligence, the fidelity, the conciliatory and affectionate spirit, in which, so far as I have yet seen or known, the clergy of this diocese, to their power, and in some instances beyond their power, have laboured and are labouring.

Nor will I conceal my hope, that when our wants are more generally known, deserving candidates may more readily offer themselves to our rulers for situations, which, as they claim, undoubtedly, no common share of talent and diligence to discharge their duties effectually, so a greater and more immediate return of usefulness is obtainable in them than in almost any stations of ministerial labour which have come within the compass of my experience.

It is, indeed, most true, that those men would be much mistaken who should anticipate, in the fortunes of an Indian chaplain, a life of indolence, of opulence, of luxury. An Indian chaplain must come prepared for hard labour in a climate where labour is often death; he must come pre

pared for rigid self-denial in situations where all around him invites to sensual indulgence; he must be content with an income liberal, indeed, in itself, but very often extremely disproportioned to the charities, the hospitalities, the unavoidable expenses of his station. He must be content to bear his life in his hand, and to leave, very often, those dearer than life to His care who feeds the ravens.

Nor are the qualifications which he will need, nor are the duties which will rest on him, less arduous than the perils of his situation. He must be no uncourtly recluse, or he will lose his influence over the higher ranks of his congregation. He must be no man of pleasure, or he will endanger their souls and his own. He must be a scholar, and a man of cultivated mind, for, in many of his hearers (wherever he is stationed), he will meet with a degree of knowledge and refinement which a parochial minister in England does not often encounter, and a spirit, sometimes of fastidious and even sceptical criticism, which the society, the habits, and, perhaps, the very climate of India, has a natural tendency to engender. He must condescend to simple men, for here, as elsewhere, the majority of his congregation will, nevertheless, be the ignorant and the poor.

Nor, in his intercourse with this humble class of his hearers, must he anticipate the same cheering circumstances which make the house of the English parochial minister a school and temple of religion, and his morning and evening walk a source of blessing and blessedness. His servants will be of a different creed from himself, and insensible, in too many instances, to his example, his ex'hortations, and his prayers. His intercourse will not be with the happy and harmless peasant, but with the dissipated, the diseased, and often, the demoralized soldier. His feet will not be found at the wicker gate of the wellknown cottage; beneath the venerable tree; in the grey church-porch, or by the side of the hop-ground and the corn-field; but he must kneel by the bed of infection or despair, in the barrack, the prison, or the hospital.

But to the well-tempered, the well-educated, the diligent and pious clergyman, who can endear himself to the poor without vulgarity, and to the rich without involving himself

in their vices; who can reprove sin without harshness, and comfort penitence without undue indulgence; who delights in his Master's.work, even when divested of those outward circumstances which in our own country contribute to render that work picturesque and interesting; who feels a pleasure in bringing men to God, proportioned to the extent of their previous wanderings; who can endure the coarse (perhaps fanatical) piety of the ignorant and vulgar, and listen with joy to the homely prayers of men long strangers to the power of religion; who can do this, without himself giving way to a vain enthusiasm; and whose good sense, sound knowledge, and practical piety, can restrain and reclaim the enthusiasm of others within the due limits of reason and scripture; to him, above all, who can give his few leisure hours to fields of usefulness beyond his immediate duty; and who, without neglecting the European penitent, can aspire to the further extension of Christ's kingdom among the heathen; to such a man as Martyn was, and as some still are, (whom may the Lord of the harvest long continue to His Church!) I can promise no common usefulness and enjoyment in the situation of an Indian chaplain.

I can promise him, in any station to which he may be assigned, an educated society and an audience peculiarly qualified to exercise and strengthen his powers of argument and eloquence. I can promise him, generally speaking, the favour of his superiors, the friendship of his equals, and affection, strong as death, from those whose wanderings he corrects, whose distresses he consoles, and by whose sick and dying bed he stands as a ministering angel! Are further inducements needful? I yet can promise more. I can promise to such a man the esteem, the regard, the veneration of the surrounding Gentiles; the consolation, at least, of having removed from their minds, by his blameless life and winning manners, some of the most inveterate and most injurious prejudices which oppose, with them, the reception of the Gospel; and the honour, it may be, (of which examples are not wanting among you,) of planting the cross of Christ in the wilderness of a heathen heart,

and extending the frontiers of the visible Church amid the hills of darkness and the strong holds of error and idolatry.

In what I have said, I feel that I have expressed, almost without intending it, my opinion as to what manner of man an Indian chaplain ought to be; and to such of you, my brethren, as fill that honourable rank, any further pastoral advice seems scarcely necessary. If there be any thing more, it must relate to matters of detail and local expediency, which may be left to every man for himself, according to his personal and particular experience.

Two such points there are, however, which I would generally press on the notice of all, because I can hardly conceive a situation in this country, where an attention to both will not be both necessary and blessed.

The first is, a continued and earnest furtherance of and attention to those powerful aids in your spiritual work, by the bounty of individuals, the parental care of government, and the pious munificence of the venerable Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, in regimental or station schools, wherever they exist or can be established; in the dissemination of religious tracts, of our excellent Liturgy, and the Holy Scriptures; and in the arrangement and conduct of those lending libraries, which should more particularly fall under the chaplain's care, and which I hope, by God's blessing, to see established throughout this land, wherever there is a barrack to receive, or an European soldier or invalid to use them.

The second point which I would recommend to every chaplain who is preparing himself for India, or who yet looks forward to a lengthened residence herc, is the attentive and grammatical study of some one of the native languages. I mean not merely that jargon which a few weeks will bestow; which is picked up in our intercourse with the meanest of the people, and which suffices, perhaps, to order bread to be placed on our table, or to expedite our journey from stage to stage. Nor do I recommend, as a general measure, what is to most impracticable, and useful, perhaps, to few, an investigation of the abstruse elegancies and intricate machinery of the learned language of the

brahmins. But I do earnestly recommend some further attention than the majority of chaplains in India are accustomed to pay, to those dialects which are intelligible to the great body of the Indian people, and which well-born and well-educated men employ in conversing with each

other.

The duty, indeed, of endeavouring the conversion of his heathen neighbours, is to a chaplain, I readily admit, an iccidental duty only. It is a duty, nevertheless, expressly contemplated in those laws which send him hither; and the times may yet return in which it may be expedient to remind the opponents of Gentile conversion, that to acquire the languages and instruct the natives of India is declared in the charter of these colonies, to be a legitimate and necessary part of the labours of every chaplain whom the East India Company shall employ. I allow, nevertheless, that a chaplain has other and more immediate cares. His vocation is, in the first instance, to the scattered flock of Christ in these lands, to the conversion and renewal of all who are already named after our Lord and Saviour. But God forbid that any among us should forget that it is his duty, as occasion offers, to labour after the good of all men; that he has no commission from God but that which commands him to preach the Gospel to every creature; and that there are patterns before him, of men abundantly and exemplarily zealous in their duty to their European charge, who have found leisure, nevertheless, for conveying the word of salvation to those without these limits, and, to the praise of presbyter, have added that of evangelist.

But this is not all. Even if you found no opportunity, or possessed no talent for convincing the professed unbeliever, yet in every city, and almost every cantonment of British India, a numerous and increasing population is found, the children of Europeans, and too often the monuments of their vices, who, notwithstanding their English descent, are accessible to instruction through the languages of India alone, and who, though divested of the pride of caste, and, not a few of them nominally Christians, have as much need to be instructed in the first rudiments of Christianity as the inhabitants of Polynesia or Japan. On these